Guiding Lantern
by sunsolace
Summary: Deacon has a... unique teaching style. Luckily, she was a lawyer in another life. Part 5 of A Lantern in the Dark.


**A/N:** Minor spoilers if you haven't completed Deacon's first affinity conversation. Apologies for the amount of dialogue lifted from the game, but this was pretty important conversation for Kaelyn and Deacon and I wanted to tweak a few things to be more in-character for her.

* * *

When Deacon pulls Kaelyn aside, she's curious.

Sunlight flashes white-gold on his sunglasses, like oversized platinum coins, when he glances past her shoulder to check for threats. This close, she can see old sunburn peeling on his nose. "I'm used to flying solo, but I've gotta admit, working with you makes me think I've been missing out. Having someone watching your back is... refreshing. When the Institute could be on our tail at any moment, it's good to know a friendly pair of eyes are watching too."

However cautious the sentiment is, being permitted even a glimpse of the inner workings of Deacon's mind is like striking open a stone to find a shimmering vein of opal. Kaelyn prepares to wiggle through the opening he's created with all the care she would take questioning a client on the witness stand. "You prefer to work alone? And here I thought I was just another in a long line of recruits you've mentored."

"I teach the rookies what a dead drop is, sure, but I'm not usually a team player. Partnering up in the Railroad can leave you vulnerable—one more person who can finger you to the Institute. In some ways, you're lucky."

Mid-way through scanning the street for movement, Kaelyn flinches. "You're going to have to explain that one to me."

Deacon flicks one hand at the pip-boy latched around her wrist. "You took the big nap and everyone you know is long gone. Some people at HQ are jealous, you know."

She feels cold all of a sudden. That sepulchral chill slithers down her spine, tightening her ribs into frigid iron bands. A two hundred year old experiment in a graveyard of ice and blood—that's all she was.

Kaelyn walks to the broken edge of the sidewalk, every step slow. Methodical.

"Deacon," she says, and her voice is too steady, and her blood pounds in her ears, and her breath is faint. She points to the main road that tracks southeast into the city. Behind it the freeway overpass looms, its rusted bulk unusually silent, as if in salute to a fellow pre-war remnant. "You see that? I used to drive on that road to get to work every day. For you it's all just stories, but the world before the bombs was my _life._ " She asks, too softly, "You know how my neighbors died? The ones who weren't on the surface when the shock wave hit Sanctuary Hills? They suffocated in those coffins—collateral damage because the Institute wanted my son. And my family? My family is _gone_."

Her gaze cuts to Deacon, sharp as knives on a still winter's day. "Don't call it a good thing. Never again."

Deacon halts beside her, keeping his distance. But his response is earnest and, more importantly, unthinking. "Hell—no, I didn't mean it like that. Sorry. But the thing is, you have no one the Institute can use against you."

Kaelyn gives him a flat look. "They have my son, Deacon. You don't get better hostage material than that."

"True, but given the effort they went to, I don't think your kid's expendable. Not like any family an agent could have on the surface." He lowers his voice, but Kaelyn doesn't think it's merely to minimize the risk of being overheard when he says: "If the church gets compromised and the coursers are on our tail, then at least you're not putting more people in harm's way. That's all."

For all that she wants to stay angry, the coldly analytical part if her brain respects the grim logic, if nothing else. Kaelyn loosens her arms from where they're clamped around her ribs. She has to rub warmth back into her hands, but no matter what socks she wears her feet remain cold. "Okay."

Deacon watches her with a face that is perfectly blank.

She sets a brisk pace, her mind circling over their conversation with all the relentlessness of a vulture. Two blocks away, she wets her lips and asks, "How often does the Institute attack friends and relatives?"

"Often enough it's not paranoia to be worried. I don't know if the coursers are simply acting on wrong intel or if it's intentional. To scare us into submission."

"I wouldn't put anything past the Institute. Right now, fear is their greatest weapon." If the recently-arrived Brotherhood of Steel ever manage to lure the Institute into their desired war, she has to wonder if that will change.

She has to wonder if she wants to know the Institute's full capabilities.

"Right. But what they're banking on is that we all have friends and family we don't want hurt."

Kaelyn cocks her head at that. "What, you have relatives you want dead?"

To his credit, Deacon chuckles once at her pathetic attempt at a joke. "Close, but no. I'm a synth. At least, that's what they tell me. So I really don't have anything to lose. For Glory and me and the others, it's easier to dedicate ourselves to the cause."

Surprise disrupts the rhythm of her walk the way rocks would plummet into a pond. "You're a synth? I had no idea." Realizing how that sounds, she shakes her head. "But that's the point, I suppose."

There's a moment of suspicion, of course. Deacon's reputation is well-earned, refined with with the same care an artist would spend carving a life-sized statue from marble. His masterpiece thrives on the delicate balance between shadow and light, with just enough sunlit stone to put people at ease.

But surely he wouldn't lie about something so deeply personal?

When Deacon hands over the folded piece of paper, creased and yellowed and stained, she's touched.

"This is my recall code. If you need to learn about the Institute, use this. But only read it to me if you have to. It'll wipe my memories. I don't even know how much of me would be left afterward."

"Deacon—"

He holds up a hand, palm up. "Don't say anything. It's going to be dark in a few hours. We need to find a good spot to hole up in. Come on."

This is all one big distraction, even if the conversation didn't go in his anticipated direction. Has to be, to test her focus when something threatens to claim her attention away from the bombed-out suburbs they now prowl. Why else would be drop this bombshell now, on the road, when they should be locating Mercer Safehouse? What he doesn't know is that she's learned to live with fear preying on her mind at every step, learned to stoke the vengeance driving her forward when she feels too weak to carry on, learned to keep her head down and see only the next step in her journey, the next goal that brings her closer to Shaun.

So she pushes the curiosity away, puts her head down, and focuses on nothing but reaching a safe place for the night. What they find is a feral-free parking lot half-conquered by the encroaching woods where grass has weaseled into every crack in the asphalt and a brave sapling even grows out of one of the potholes.

Kaelyn watches the leaping flames that cough up plumes of smoke and cinders, under the pretense of monitoring the mole rat roast.

Deacon shifts with a scrape of gravel from where he sits beside her, perching his feet on a rock nearby. "You know, I'm having second thoughts on the whole recall code business." Something hard and sardonic twists his mouth, and yet his voice is so very sly when he accuses: "You read it, didn't you?"

Startled into plain honesty, she says, "No. You asked me not to."

"Good." He nods once, an absurdly chipper motion just a few steps shy of crippling fear. "Please don't. It'll make it easier to sleep at night."

Running a thumb over the folded edge of the note, Kaelyn's eyebrows tug into a frown as she watches him. He's the same Deacon, no matter his origins, but it casts a new light on his presence in Railroad, and she has wondered what someone so irreverent and questioning is doing in an organization that fights a losing game. And he's more jittery now than she's ever seen him.

It isn't even a decision—not when it's a measure of reassurance she can give.

"If it bothers you that much, Deacon," Kaelyn presses the note, still folded, into his palm, "then it's not worth you losing sleep over."

Something his expression shifts just slightly, enough to be noticed but not enough to be knowable. "I— if you believe anything, believe this: I'm in your corner. Always have been."

Sensing this is as far as this conversation needs to go, Kaelyn wanders to the bumper of a nearby car to take first watch. She leaves him turning over that slip of paper between his fingers, firelight reflecting off his glasses.

* * *

When she opens her satchel the next morning and finds that little piece of paper on top of her change of clothes, she's suspicious.

It's no quirk of coincidence that Deacon's recall code has ended up back in her possession. The paper is thin enough that black ink seeps through the paper in tantalizing blotches.

She finally concedes to curiosity.

Four words. Twenty letters. Little black pen scratches in precise penmanship, so innocuous on their own. Together they form a string of words that have Kaelyn crumpling the note in her fist.

The man himself materializes from a gap in the woods, sunglasses already in place. Having never seen him sleep, she doesn't know if he's just put them on to ward off the fresh blue sky, or if he never took them off. Intercepting him before he can sit by the revived fire, Kaelyn holds up the slip of paper, flattened out, those damning words facing him. "What is this?"

Deacon cocks his chin at the page. "Did you read it?"

"'You can't trust everyone.'"

Deacon spasms, his limbs jerking and face twitching. When Kaelyn remains unmoved, he drops the act. "Did I get you?"

Kaelyn narrows her eyes.

Deacon watches her back, a shit-eating grin curling about his mouth. This is the reputation he owns: a laughing snake, as likely to beguile as to give counsel. "Don't take it personal. I lie to everyone. Maybe I'm just another human who has people back home he wants to protect. Then again…" His voice takes on an exaggerated robotic tone when he says: "Maybe not."

"So was this to get your daily lie quota filled, or was there a point to all this?"

His sigh carries a weary edge, as if he's disappointed it needs explaining. "I'm supposed to be showing you the ropes, so let's just say this is lesson, well, whatever number we're at. That code I gave you?" He jerks his chin at the slip of paper in her hand. "It's a hard truth. You can't trust everyone. No matter how sincere someone sounds, they could be an Institute replacement, or belong to any of the other charming folk who want the Railroad dismantled. The bitch of the problem is recognizing the ninety percent of the time someone's on the up and up and the ten percent time you're being played."

Of all the things—

A rush of incredulity washes through Kaelyn. He doesn't need to plant the seed of mistrust. It burrowed deep under her skin two hundred years ago, when smiling faces welcomed the few survivors of Sanctuary Hills into their new home, when soothing tongues promised a quick decontamination before getting settled. It is not the kind of seedling that sprouts upright, bursting free of the earth to meet the sun; no, it is a tangle of roots that curl deeper with every new betrayal, spiderwebbing into a network of silk-fine, steel-strong threads to catch threats before they can cut her to the quick.

Since coming to the surface, she has never known what she could risk giving away, and to who. The first body she looted—she took his road leathers to conceal the blue of her vault suit.

Kaelyn doesn't need him cultivating her suspicion to his particular tastes, either.

"You don't need to teach me that some people aren't worth trusting. I am— _was_ a lawyer. I know people. I know what the stakes are out here with the Institute breathing down our backs."

And no matter his reputation, this is the truth: Desdemona trusts him. Kaelyn trusts him. Because no matter the lies dripping from his tongue, his hands are honest.

She can't be sure with his eyes concealed, but she swears his gaze dips to the crumpled note in her hand. "I don't think this conversation was nearly as unenlightening as you seem to think."

"I never said it was unenlightening. I questioned its purpose. The next time you spin a story about being some long lost heir to the Maxson dynasty, I'll be ready."

That, and she can render him momentarily speechless through unexpected acts of decency—and _that_ is far more telling than Deacon would no doubt prefer.

He grins. "Well, damn, that's not half bad. Secret prince who joined the opposition to smack down his half-brother? I'm keeping that one for the next recruit." He looks up at her, all duplicitous innocence, and offers a box of Dandy Boy apples from his pack.

So Kaelyn lowers herself beside him, a smile softening the edges of her mouth, and accepts his peace offering.


End file.
